A buddy has an old Compaq Armada PII laptop w/64MB ram... ...What's the slowest/oldest hardware you've sucessfully ran Win2K on?
I used to own a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a PentiumII/266 with 64MB of RAM and a 10GB Travelstar. It originally ran NT4 Workstation, but was later upgraded to Win2K Pro and then XP Pro.
Under both Win2K and XP, performance was rotten. Boot up times soared, Win2K worst of the three. I became an expert at disabling NT services I didn't need. Running one application was sluggish, but several caused the system to swap like a banshee.
I upgraded the 32MB expansion module to a 128MB module, giving me 160MB total. I also upgraded the Travelstar HDD (10GB, 4200 RPM, ATA-4, 512KB cache, 12.5ms seek) to a newer Toshiba HDD (40GB, 5400 RPM, UDMA-6, 8MB cache, 12ms seek).
The difference was amazing. My laptop booted in half the time, most noticable with application loading in the background after logging in. I could have all of my productivity and Internet applications running, and the system would hardly swap.
Some apps were still sluggish, like Visio bringing up a diagram, or Acrobat Reader rendering a page with lots of fonts and graphics, but overall system speed was very good for such an old system.
Overall, with the added memory and faster, increased storage, the system was very usable. Prior, it could be considered an emergency backup system at best.